As we move along in our Brand Positioning series, we’ve covered the Importance of Brand DNA, Defining your Target Audiences, and Clarifying your Brand Messaging. Now it’s time to place our focus toward the next step of Creating your Communication Roadmap.

Investing time in defining your Communication Roadmap benefits your business in many ways, which I will cover later in this article, but the most important benefit is that it’s a strategic outline of the most efficient ways to reach and engage your target audiences.

How you Communicate Matters

Whether you’re a solopreneur, a mom and pop establishment, or the leader of a multi-national corporation, the way in which you communicate is essential to the level of success you will achieve. In fact, studies show that current consumer buying decisions are based more on the consumer’s ability to connect with the brand emotionally than the cost of the offering.

The ability to connect with your audiences has never been more effortless. The rise of social media, digital marketing, podcasting, video, and blogging have created endless ways to reach your audiences. The issue with this surplus of communicative platforms is that we can easily become caught up in trying to use all of them at once and this can unknowingly become problematic.

How to use your communication roadmap

With each article you write, post you publish, comment you tweet, podcast you record, video you shoot, and so on, you open a dialogue with your audience that establishes a connection. The stronger that connection becomes, the better the chance they become loyal to your brand and organic brand ambassadors, championing your products and services to those who trust their opinions.

The popularity of content marketing has created countless opportunity for you to connect with your current and prospective customers, and often times we find ourselves attempting to have a presence on all platforms, which is not the best strategy for a number of reasons. As mentioned previously, this is where things can become problematic.

Attempting to have a presence on every social channel or deliver content via every medium limit your ability to specialize and create messaging that will genuinely connect with those you’re attempting to reach. The reason the “be everywhere” approach is often ineffective is due to time. We usually do not have the luxury of allocating the time required to be successful on every platform. If you are one who has the team and ability to do so, congratulations, but for the majority of entrepreneurs, this is not a reality.

It’s essential to be knowledgeable of where your audiences are, and strategic in how you communicate and promote to them, and this is where and a defined communication roadmap comes into play.

Here are three benefits of a Communication Roadmap

Reaching Audience on Their Turf It provides the ability to understand where your audience lives online. If your audience spends a majority of its time on Snapchat and Instagram, there is not a need to invest time on Linkedin. Your roadmap will define these things and allow you to focus your energy where it matters most.

Understanding Tone It provides the ability to be knowledgeable of which platforms your audience use most, allowing you to apply a tone to your messaging that fits the specific vibe of the platform.

Optimizing Marketing Budget Having an understanding of the exact platforms your audiences prefer and spend their time provides the ability to optimize where you place your marketing dollars.

Gone are the day’s where you simply blast messages out to the masses in hopes they buy what you’re offering. The right communication strategy allows you to develop real relationships with your audiences, relationships that lead to positioning yourself as the brand of choice in your market.